‘Saving Radiance’ or ‘Unbearable Disturbance’?
Science fiction, Hollywood and pop culture have long speculated — sometimes with fright, sometimes with eager anticipation — on the impacts of technology on human life.
Back in 1936, Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp” viewed industrialization as the dehumanization of society, with humans reduced to cogs on conveyor belts. In later films — from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) to the “Terminator” franchise (1984) to “I, Robot” (2004), “WALL-E” (2008) and many others — technology becomes sentient, sometime malevolent, and takes over from the hapless humans who created it. In “2001,” the computer HAL’s implacable monotonal response to his human’s commands — “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.” — is one of the most chilling lines in filmdom.
Today, humans confront technological changes even more massive, profound and far-reaching than the Industrial Revolution and sentient robots combined. But even “the godfather of artificial intelligence,” Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is credited with advances that led to creation of AI, now believes his techno-child poses “an existential threat” to humankind.
Hinton quit his position as Google’s AI technology vice president in 2023, saying he had “changed his mind about the relationship between humans and digital intelligence,” the New York Times reported. “A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.”
New technologies have always threatened the status quo — in my field, mass communication, the advent of the printing press reduced humans’ oral traditions and abilities; when radio came along, it was seen as a threat to books; TV would displace radio and reading; cable TV reduced dependence on broadcasting, and the internet was/ is a threat to all of the above. In 1982, the photographic world was turned over when no less authoritative a source than National Geographic altered an image of camels and pyramids so it would fit better on its cover.
And now comes AI. AI affects reality itself — seeing is no longer believing (or shouldn’t be) as AI images, sounds, music, video, become more real and attractive than reality. AI creates video of the president in a fighter jet or the photo of a kindly old man with a robotic cat on page 1. Half of the random background music on my YouTube feed is AI-generated, and completely enjoyable. But is it real? Does it matter?
Educators worry that the dumbing of America is a runaway train, and an increasing number ban computers and cellphones from the classroom. Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell wrote in the Washington Post last month, “Colleges are reviving proctored exams, blue books and oral assessments as they try to determine whether students are learning or merely using artificial intelligence.”
Then there are workforce, economic and environmental impacts. Huge data centers to instantly crunch information are springing up across thousands of acres of rural land, often deserts, where they consume enormous amounts of electricity to run thousands and thousands of high-speed computers, and require millions of gallons of water to cool them. In Utah, where I used to live, just one of the four huge data centers in the works covers 40,000 acres (62 square miles), roughly three times the size of Manhattan.
AI technology, applications and impacts are exploding in daily human life, often in ways we don’t even notice. For some, the technology is a gift and a boon. Others find AI as scary as any Hollywood movie (see “AI Hopes & Fears,” page 17).
When writer E.B. White first saw TV demonstrated in 1938, he said the new technology would be either “an unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.” Now comes AI, and the jury’s out.
Ted Pease hides out in the redwoods in Trinidad.
